The regional issue of stormwater runoff

The flow of water across the landscape is an important mechanism for the transport of biological, chemical and physical constituents. The land surface dynamics which are effected by changes in runoff have important consequences on a number of major issues that are central to the health of Puget Sound. The Distributed Hydrologic Soil and Vegetation Model (DHSVM) is a distributed hydrologic model that explicitly represents the effects of topography and vegetation on water fluxes through the landscape. It is typically applied at high spatial resolutions on the order of 100 m for watersheds up to 100,000 km2 and at sub-daily timescales for multi-year simulations. It has been applied predominantly to mountainous watersheds in the Pacific Northwest in the United States.

DHSVM is a research model and is continuously under development. PRISM actively advances the application of the DHSVM code to each of the Puget Sound watersheds and linkages with the MM5 atmospheric circulation model for simulation through the region's hydrometeorological models.